Ethel Le Rossignol
Ethel Le Rossignol drifts into view like a whisper from another century, a presence rather than a person, a woman who painted not from thought but from transmission. Born in 1873, under skies far from England, in Argentina perhaps, yet bound by invisible lines to the Channel Islands and London, she carried that strange mixture of exile and belonging that so often produces visionaries. You can almost see her, poised between two worlds, one of form and light, one of soundless instruction. Her hand, trained in art, steady from service as a nurse in the war, later became the vessel of something other. She said she did not paint these things; they were given through her, from a voice, a teacher, a companion in spirit called J.P.F. — initials that feel both ordinary and immense, like an anonymous key to eternity.
Between 1920 and 1933, in the quiet unfolding of years, she made forty-four paintings, luminous and strange, collected together under the title A Goodly Company. They are not mere pictures; they are communications, assurances, declarations that life is not extinguished by death but transformed. The colours in them seem to breathe, the forms are not static but moving inwardly, spiralling, alive. They shimmer as though the pigments themselves remember heaven. Each painting accompanied by words — teachings dictated, phrases full of moral clarity and tenderness. It is the art of someone who believes deeply that grief can be healed by revelation.
To look at her work is to stand at a threshold: the human hand makes the line, but the line itself feels not human. The figures float, the light radiates through patterned gold, and everywhere there is ascent — souls lifting, wings unfurling, flowers of consciousness blooming in an etheric garden. She must have sat for hours, utterly still, while the hand moved and drew, the images forming like dreams solidified into matter. And when the work was finished, she published it herself, privately, in 1933 — A Goodly Company: A Series of Psychic Drawings Given Through the Hand of Ethel Le Rossignol as an Assurance of Survival After Death — an entire cosmology bound in a book, modestly offered to those who could see.
In her lifetime she was little known outside the small, glowing world of spiritualists and seekers, but she did not seem to crave fame. Her aim was communion, not career. Later, as the years gathered and the world moved on — new wars, new art, new cynicisms — she remained quietly at her easel, and eventually gave her paintings to the College of Psychic Studies in London, a sanctuary for such otherworldly relics. There they rest now, twenty-one of them at least, protected and occasionally displayed, their colours still radiating the warmth of unseen suns.
To encounter Ethel is to wonder about the boundaries of creation. Was she painting, or was she being painted through? The question dissolves, because in her world the artist and the spirit were one current flowing. Her pictures anticipate so many later visions — Hilma af Klint, Georgiana Houghton, the psychedelics of the sixties — yet remain uniquely hers: delicate, devotional, sure. Her line trembles not with uncertainty but with reverence.
You feel, standing before her work, that she believed utterly in goodness — not naive goodness, but a goodness tested, instructed, radiant beyond suffering. That is perhaps why she called it A Goodly Company: a gathering of souls, a fellowship of light, the company of those who endure and rise. In her long life, stretching nearly a century, she watched empires fall, worlds change, but her art stayed like a flame cupped in the hand. It is the record of one woman listening carefully to silence, and letting that silence speak in colour.
Ethel Le Rossignol — painter, medium, messenger — remains a secret voice of the early twentieth century, one who turned inward and found eternity waiting. To read her images is to hear that voice still: patient, luminous, saying only — we are not lost; we are all part of the goodly company.
